The TLS is out with an essay on Ray­mond Carver and Gordon Lish, a new entry in a debate I’ve found inter­mit­tently fas­ci­nat­ing. For those who haven’t been fol­low­ing the story, the ques­tion at its heart is how much what we think of as Carver’s writ­ing was actu­ally the work of Lish, his editor. It’s been known for a long time that Lish’s edi­to­r­ial inter­ven­tions were exten­sive, but not until some of Carver’s early drafts appeared—first in a 2007 New Yorker fea­ture and then in Begin­ners, a pre-​Lish ver­sion of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love that’s included in this year’s the Library of Amer­ica Carver—did the read­ing public learn just how much Lish had altered Carver’s orig­i­nal work. (James Camp­bell, author of the TLS piece, notes that Lish had cut most of the sto­ries in Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by more than 50%.)

As with every lit­er­ary debate, there’s a sig­nif­i­cant per­sonal back­story to the Carver-​Lish drama. It began with Lish’s orig­i­nal cham­pi­oning of Carver, which inspired him, it seems, to claim a pro­pri­etary inter­est not only in the author’s sub­se­quent career but also in the min­i­mal­ist style on which it so famously thrived. And the drama con­tin­ues to this day, nearly twenty years after Carver’s death, with an argu­ment between Tess Gal­lagher (his widow) and Knopf (his pub­lisher) over how much of the pre-​edited work should be released. (Lish seems to have stayed out of the fight, at least publicly.)

But the debate over the authen­tic­ity of Carver’s stories—the efforts to nail down to the third dec­i­mal place what per­cent­age of “his” work was really his, and what per­cent­age Lish’s—obscures what for me is the more inter­est­ing ques­tion: what if it’s simply the case that in writ­ing, as in so many other areas of life, sev­eral people work­ing together can pro­duce better work than a single person work­ing alone?

Annie Dil­lard, the Pulitzer Prize-​winning author of Pil­grim at Tinker Creek and The Maytrees, is sell­ing signed limited-​edition prints of her visual art. Some of these, like the one above, are paint­ings of a spot in south­west Vir­ginia not so near but cer­tainly dear to my heart. (If you ever won­dered why John Denver called West Vir­ginia “almost heaven” let me tell you: he didn’t get far enough south.)

For those of you with some dis­pos­able income to spare (do you exist, dear friends?) Annie’s prints are a real steal at $350. For the rest of you, here’s her take on learn­ing to draw, from her memoir An Amer­i­can Childhood:

1/ “Signals at Sea,” a poem by Annie Dil­lard built of pas­sages from Cugle’s Prac­ti­cal Nav­i­ga­tion and pub­lished in Morn­ings Like This:

(If the flags in A’s hoist cannot be made out,
B keeps her answer­ing pen­nant at the “Dip”
and hoists the signal “OWL” or “WCX.”)

CXL Do not aban­don me.
A I am under­go­ing a speed trial.
D Keep clear of me - I am maneu­ver­ing
with dif­fi­culty.
F I am dis­abled. Com­mu­ni­cate with me.
G I require a pilot.

P Your lights are out, or burn­ing badly.
U You are stand­ing into danger.
X Stop car­ry­ing out your inten­tions.
K You should stop your vessel instantly.
L You should stop. I have some­thing
impor­tant to communicate.

R You may feel your way past me.

2/ “ROMEO AND JULIET,” a poem by Hannah Weiner built of pas­sages from the Inter­na­tional Code of Sig­nals and pub­lished in The Code Poems (now avail­able in Hannah Weiner’s Open House, a new selec­tion of her poems edited by Patrick Durgin):

MFD Juliet: Try to enter
KZU Romeo: I am in dif­fi­cul­ties; direct me how to steer
OOX Juliet: You should swing and enter stern first
HBK Romeo: What is the nature of the bottom or what kind of bottom have you?
HAY Juliet: Double bottom
FHR Romeo: Stern way. Going astern
LK Juliet: Go astern easy. Easy astern
ODI Romeo: I am going full speed
HC Juliet: It is not safe to go so fast
KZY Romeo: It is dif­fi­cult to extri­cate
BK Juliet: Is any­thing the matter
VLA Romeo: Cock broken or dam­aged
EHR Juliet: What do the cost of repairs amount to?
DF Romeo: With some assis­tance I shall be able to set things to rights

This week­end the New York Times Book Review finally gets around to review­ing Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. (You can read it now here.)

Julia Reed, the reviewer, likes the book, but it takes half the review before she’ll admit it. First she has to work her way through famil­iar com­plaints about Dillard’s vocab­u­lary and the by now com­mon­place quo­ta­tion from Eudora Welty’s 1975 Pil­grim at Tinker Creek review. But Reed gets there, grudg­ingly, even­tu­ally call­ing the book “a near great one.”